UPDATE 2025
This commentary was written years ago in an effort to promote the mostly forgotten and certainly overlooked qualities of Bread‘s superb recordings.
We are rarely able to do shootouts for their albums these days, due to a lack of interest on our customers’ parts, at least at the prices we tend to charge for great sounding pressings of their classic releases. More’s the pity.
Although we were able to do Manna in 2024, and The Best of Bread in 2025, our last shootout for On the Waters was way back in 2012.
Instead, we recommend you pick up some early pressings of Bread’s albums at your local record store and see if the wondeful analog sound Armin Steiner achieved in the studio makes you a fan of the band the way it did me.
More on Armin Steiner and Bread here.
In many ways On the Waters is a Demo Disc recording.
Listening to the Tubey Magical acoustic guitars on the best copies brings back memories of my first encounter with an original Pink Label Tea for the Tillerman. Rich, sweet, full-bodied, effortlessly dynamic — that sound knocked me out thirty-odd years ago, and here, on an album by the largely-forgotten band Bread, is that sound again.
Looking back, 1970 turned out to be a great year for rock and pop, arguably the greatest.
I’ve always been a sucker for this kind of well-crafted pop. If you are too, then a Hot Stamper copy of any of their releases will no doubt become a treasured Demo Disc in your home as well.
Audiophiles with high quality turntables literally have an endless supply of good recordings to discover and enjoy.
No matter how many records you own, you can’t possibly have even scratched the surface of the vast recorded legacy of the last sixty years.
